Discussion: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

This text is being read in the section called Politics & The Body, along with The Communist Manifesto, Freud, Thoreau and Frankenstein.  Professor Thomas Grieve led the class this time, a specialist in literature from the modern period (1910-1930)

Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:

• Loss of pastoral world
• Class system
• War

He quoted from Wordsworth

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          The world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mellors represented the world that is being lost.  He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks.  His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".

We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors.  It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate.  They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.

Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel.  They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking.  This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times.  At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"

Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global.  The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.

Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel.  How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it.  For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us.  His hero, Mellors holds the power.  Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel.  He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus.  It's the man who liberates the woman.  He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually.  For me it was quite paternalistic.  I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.

Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men.  Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.

Lawrence: Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterly's Lover; Bantam Classics, New York, 2007

This edition is a Bantam re-issue of the "Original Unexpurgated 1928 Orioli Edition" with a 1968 preface by Lawrence Durrell and a newer introduction by Ronald Friedland.  The backstory and explanations about this book were almost as fascinating as the book itself.  Because of the language and the subject matter, Lawrence knew it would have trouble getting it published in England so it was published in Italy.  I remember reading this book in either my late teens or early 20's.  I don't remember finding the book to be anything special at the time - though I was probably equal parts titillated and made anxious by the language and sex scenes, having been an obedient and overtly conforming child.

Reading this book now, from the vantage point of well-established adulthood, I found the descriptive language enthralling and the perspective on the industrial age fascinating.  The use of dialect - and I'm more tolerant of the use of words like fuck and cunt now - not because I'm more tolerant to crude language (I still think it's lazy, limiting and monotonous) but because I'm open to the idea that Lawrence needed to use these words to communicate the point he was trying to make.  This changed viewpoint no doubt owes something to the years I've accumulated but also something to the course texts I've been reading and discussing since September.  I also think it reflects how the world has changed in the last few decades, that is, even within my lifetime.

The book starts out with Sir Clifford and Lady Chatterly [Constance] married; and though they feel during their one month's honeymoon that they are intimate, it's not a physical intimacy.

this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction. ... No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And the sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. pg 9

 After the honeymoon in 1917 Clifford ships off to war.  He is shipped back home in 1918, "smashed", paralyzed and with no interest in any physical intimacy with Connie.  Their life is one of her supporting him in his efforts to achieve fame and fortune as a writer.  His dependence and her subservience as 'helpmeet' create a life they both initially deem intimacy.  Connie eventually looks for something more and begins a sexual love affair with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Mellors.  Mellors is a Tevershall man, born into a collier family but raised above his 'station' during his service during the war, in India.  He comes back, somewhat physically damaged by the war, emotionally damaged by his unhappy marriage to a local woman, and determined to live a quiet life in the woods, alone.

Lawrence expounds upon 2 main themes in his novel: the evils of industrialization and the redeeming power of sexual connection.  His descriptions of the Nottinghamshire countryside, where he grew up, are evocative of the blight that descended upon the green countryside of England.

but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.  pg 10

The people were as haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. pg 11

...up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding... pg 11 

Sir Clifford's friends are all a bit effete, snobs with various character gaps and hangups, prejudices and damage.  The most appealing of these for me was Tommy Dukes, his bachelor friend who, when asked whether he believes in anything, replies:

"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady."  [pg 40]

Lawrence writes well about the class system and its inflexibility.   He describes the gulf between Wragby Hall, seat of the Chatterly's, and the village people of Tevershall, writing on page 12

Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps non-existent south of the Trent.  But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take place.  You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

The character of Michaelis, Lady Chatterly's 'upstart' Irish lover gives Lawrence a chance to show the relentless class system in England, in Clifford's contempt for his presumption and for being, despite all his success and his polish, the "wrong sort", an arriviste and a "Dublin mongrel."  Connie feels some sympathy for him, the outsider - "and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling."  [pg 23]  Michaelis doesn't reach her as a woman though, despite the sex - he doesn't love her.  For Lawrence, achieving orgasm at the same time is a key feature of true union between a man and a woman.  While I admired his attempts to describe love, sex etc through a woman's viewpoint, the main perspective in the book seemed very much male, with this being just one example.

Clifford is an unsympathetic character.  I initially felt sorry for him, gone to war to do his duty and returned home broken and empty.  However he is very self-absorbed, and becomes increasingly selfish - with a child's selfishness - as the years passed.  He is a snob and a man who, even without the excuse of injury and paralysis, would have self-restricted himself to a shallow, cold life empty of human connection.  Though sexual intromission is not possible for him, he has no desire for any physical intimacy with his wife, no physical connection.  His sense of entitlement due to his class, heritage and position are accepted by him to be his god-given birthright.

"No wonder the men hate you," she said.

"They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could.  Don't thrust your illusions on other people.  The masses were always the same, and will always be the same.  Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our collier or the Ford motorcar workmen...It is the masses: they are the unchangeable.  It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.  Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus.  What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and posioned our masses with a little education."

[...] "And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, nor swords.  The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be.  It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves." [pg 200]

Despite Sir Clifford's opinion that the masses and the class system are immutable, and not only should not be changed but cannot be changed, he is just as fully convinced that, give him a son fathered by anyone, and he can bring him up a proper Chatterly, ready and able to assume his rightful position.

"I don't care who his father might be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.  Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterly of him.  It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.  Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler.  Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products.  It is the overwhelming pressure of environment."

"Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said. 

"No, my child! A; that is romantic illusion.  Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate.  And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.  The individual hardly matters.  It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.  And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is."

"Then there is no common humanity between us all!"

"Just as you like.  We all need to fill our bellies.  But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there  is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes.  The two functions are opposed.  And the function determines the individual." [pg 201]

Lawrence also speaks insightfully about the emotional trauma or damage to the psyche that can persist or which can take years to manifest (he likens it to a slowly developing bruise).  This must have been something seen in returning soldiers after WW1 but it also makes me think of Freud's research and that of other psychoanalysts of the previous 50 years.  This slow persistent trauma crops up in both Sir Clifford and in Mellors, both damaged in the war.  He has a great passage about decay and time marching on:

all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind.  They were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.  They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.  [pg 52]

Lawrence wrote many passages celebrating nature and "Olde England" and decrying industrialization and the pace of change of modernity.  While this mainly manifests itself in Mellors, the gamekeeper, Clifford too longs to preserve the old ways:

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees [of the wood around Wragby Hall].  He felt they were his own through generations.  He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.  [pg 43]

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying.  Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash.  For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless, inertia, silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on.  From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world.  She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees.  They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence...  [pg 69]

There is also much phallic imagery in the book, Sex, potency and especially male sexuality are used as the barometer of a healthy life, a true life, of humanity.  Some examples of Lawrence's powers of imagery [pg 92]:

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up.  The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun!  

Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flakey oak leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky. [pg 132]

I found it interesting that Lawrence chose to write the book from a woman's point of view.  Some of his  passages seem awkward and like what a man would think a woman might feel.  Some seemed more discerning, such as when Michaelis the Irish lover is half-heartedly trying to convince Connie to leave Clifford and live with him.

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing.  These men, they were all alike, they left everything out.  They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.     [pg 54-55]

Nature is used as the antithesis of the industrialization, the civilization, the modernity of the world.  Lawrence sees that movement away from the natural to be the main cause and symptom of man's decay and eventually his destruction.  Mellors is his voice in this.

When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane.  Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane...they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up."

"You mean they'll kill one another?"

"I do...! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred year's time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten.  They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. [...]  To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else.  And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species... "[pg 239]

"...when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel ... the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. [...] [I]t's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life.  I'd wipe machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. [pg 242]

Lawrence also makes frequent mention of Mammon and the bitch-goddess of success.  Mellors the gamekeeper is a damaged man who has decided that retreat into solitude and nature are all he wants out of life.  When he connects with Lady Chatterly he is dragged back into the world of feeling, connection, relationship.

But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory.  The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it.  A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.  The world allows no hermits.  And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.  For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not the woman's fault, not even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.  The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.  There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform...

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing.... And they would do her in!  As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life.... But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.  For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.  [pg 129-130] 

Lawrence is equally pessimistic about society: "...conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. [...] He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast."  [pg 130] and about civilization:

The young ones get mad because they've no money to spend.  Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend.  That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out...The women are the maddest of all.  But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays. [...]  [pg 220]

 If you could only tell them that living and spending are not the same thing!

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't. [...] I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.  [pg 331]

Some of his writing and themes reminded me of Hemingway and trying to get back to basic pleasures, lives of action and simple motivations.  It fit in well with what we've been reading of Darwin and of Freud as well as the class concerns and angst of Dostoyesvsky.  I'm finding all the books we're reading swirling around in my brain and it's hard to pick out one thread or trail that I want to explore.  I wish I had unlimited time to explore all these thoughts and questions.

Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and its Discontents, Tr. David McLintock; Penguin Modern Classics, St. Ives 2002.

These week we are reading a work of Freud's and an essay of Thoreau's.  Knowing only the most minimal and banal information about each of these (Freud as psychoanalyst with a fixation on the Oedipus complex and blaming the mother for any difficulties in an individual's life; and Thoreau as a simple-living backwoods philosopher who wrote Walden) I didn't immediately see a connection between the 2.

The book of Freud's we are reading is about Civilization, something I have never spent much time thinking about but, if pressed, would probably have said is a good thing.  I had a hard time with the introduction as it plunged me immediately into the deep end of psychoanalytical jargon and concepts, territory unknown to me.  I immediately found myself floundering in the murky depths of concepts about the anal eroticism of young human beings, primitive sniffing men on all fours and the repression of olfactory stimulation when mankind evolved from all fours to standing erect, discussions of the id, ego and super-ego, Eros, the totemic phase, and oceanic feelings.  I was having a hard time relating this to civilization but once I got into Freud's text itself, I found much there to make me think and reflect.

Freud's discussion was a bit challenging for someone lacking any previous knowledge of his earlier works (this text being written in 1929 and Freud lived from 1856 to 1939).  What was interesting to me is what I've been exposed to, via books and media culture (TV, movies etc), during my lifetime of western society's reaction to Freud's findings during the remainder of the 20th century (and now into the 21st century).  I found his discussions (about the exigencies of civilization, the role of religion, the conflict between the individual and society) were really thought-provoking and made me want to read more in this area - though what I really wanted to read, being lazy, was a text from some learned person assessing mankind and society in the 21st century in a manner similar to Freud's processes in the late 19th and early 20th century.  I was very curious, as I read about sexual repression, the constraints civilization imposes on an individual's appetites or drives, the importance of various innate human drives, about what this now looks like for someone growing up in the 21st century.

Freud writes quite a bit about why mankind may have developed and submitted to civilization.  In return for increased security (controlling nature, decreasing risk of physical harm including starvation, exposure to the elements, mitigating against intra-species aggression etc), mankind had to give up or constrain basic human pleasure-seeking drives, most notably for Freud (and according to him, man - though it is not always clear to me when Freud means "Mankind" and when he means "man") the drive for sexual gratification.  

[...] Civilization designates the sum totals of those achievements and institutions that distinguish our life from that of our animal ancestors and serve the dual purpose of protecting human beings against nature and regulating their mutual relations. [pg 27]

Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual...The replacement of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization."  "Its essence lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction [...] The next requirement of civilization is justice. [pg 32]

Much of mankind's struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable...accommodation between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization. [pg 33]

What has occurred since Freud wrote this text, is a large body of research on animals, animal behaviour, animal societies, interactions, learning etc - and I'm fascinated by what we have learned about mankind vs the animal kingdoms in the last 100 years.

Freud goes on to discuss civilization and writes on pg 39 how, though women "1st laid the foundations of civilization with the claims of their love," men are set the difficult task of maintaining it and forced to "sublimate their drives," given that women have "little aptitude" for this and indeed soon resent men's distraction from their "duties as a husband and father."

Again, in the year 2013, almost 1/2 century since the early days of 'women's lib', I would really like to read a modern take on this from someone who has studied Freud and his field over the past few decades.  One jarring note, from a perspective 100 years later than when Freud was writing, lay in a footnote to Section IV where he notes:

... erotic relations are so often associated with a degree of direct aggression, quite apart from the sadistic component that quite properly belongs to them.  Faced with such complications, the love-object will not always be as understanding and tolerant as the farmer's wife who complained that her husband no longer loved her because he had not beaten her for a week.

Freud looks at several tactics mankind has experimented with to try and cope with the realities of civilization.  I found it interesting to read his opinion of communism, given that we read The Communist Manifesto just last week.  Freud writes about communism and the contention that mankind's "nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property." [pg 49]  He contrasts this with Christianity's grandiose and, Freud maintains, impossible commandment to 'Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee.'  Freud states that communism's attempt to redress inequality by abolishing private property rights and rights of inheritance don't take into account the 'natural' inequalities that will always occur due to varying genetic physical attributes and innate and unequal mental abilities.  Freud writes that:

Aggression was not created by property; it prevailed with almost no restriction in primitive times, when property was very scanty. [pg 50]

Freud considers aggression "an indestructible feature of human nature."

It was also interesting, on pg 50, to read Freud's comments about one outlet for mankind's natural aggression which is found within small tight cultural units, where aggression is directed outwards to outsiders.  Freud calls this the 'narcissism of small differences.' pg 51

As a scientist I enjoyed Freud's simple description of the goal of science.

...What we strive for in scientific work - a simple answer that neither neglects nor does violence to the facts.

In Part VII Freud speaks about internal controls that civilization instills to curb mankind's innate aggression, such as guilt and the need for punishment.  I'm sure I could pick up almost any book from the pantheon of literature and find this as one of the themes in the book.

Professor Zaslove sent along various extracts to consider as we read Freud this week.  One of these contained some responses Freud had communicated to Theodor Reik in 1926, when asked by Judge Emil Desenheimer of a Germanic Supreme Provincial Court for his views on capital punishment.  Freud raised the issue of 'talion' as an early legal principle, a term I'd never heard of.


According to Britannica Online Encyclopaedia: Talion:  A talion is a legal principle originating back in Babylonian times and in Palestine, based on the "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" concept.  The law makers in those times, and extending through the early Roman times and occasionally resurfacing in the middle ages, felt that the punishment should more literally match the crime.  Eventually the injured party could also choose to be compensated financially instead.  The Latin term was lex talionis.

Reading about it in Britanica Online, it made me think of my recent trip a couple of weeks ago to Todos Santos Cuchumatan, in northwestern Guatemala.  I've been there yearly since 2009, working on a canine population and rabies control project for Veterinarians Without Borders Canada.  It's a Mayan community which has been able to maintain a strong sense of identity and culture and resist the pace of change experienced elsewhere in the last century.  Though I'm seeing changes even in just 4 years, due to the availability of cellphones and the internet, it is still quite traditional.  This year we had one team member interviewing some of the people in the community.  One interesting thing to come out was a different concept of justice.  I knew that the municipal leaders spend much of their time mediating property disputes and other areas of conflict but one woman's story really brought it home to me.  Most of the dogs in Todos Santos, owned or otherwise, run loose in the community.  One woman told us that her dog, while running loose, had got into her neighbour's house and had eaten some of the neighbour's food.  The neighbour complained to the municipality and asked to be compensated for her loss.  The decision, and this was not deemed unusual by the community, was that the dog-owning woman had to either poison her dog or else pay a significant amount to the neighbour to make up for the lost food.  Being poor, the woman had to poison her own dog, something she is still heart-broken over months later.  This to me is an odd way of dispensing justice but it seems to fit with the ancient concept of 'talion'.

Freud seems to have a pessimistic tone in his book.  Having recently experienced WWI in the decade prior to this book being published, Freud must have been disillusioned about the earlier bright promise of civilization and the industrial revolution.  The aggression, territorialism, brutality and carnage that occurred during the war would have seemed an enormous fall from the civilized heights promised by the advances of the 19th century.  In this book Freud proposes that mankind may 

gradually carry out such modifications in our civilization as will better satisfy our ... demand for a form of life that will make us happy with[out] allowing so much suffering, which could probably be avoided. [pg 52]

In the year 2013, I'm finding it hard to judge whether civilization/culture or society have advanced in a desirable way from where we were at the beginning of the 20th century or whether we have lost our way.  This is probably a significant factor in my decision to embark upon this Master's program and explore the works of bright people over the preceding centuries and up until today.  I'll see if I'm able to come to any decisive conclusion 4 years hence.

Discussion: Goethe's Faust

Last class of the term and of LS800.  It's been an intense 3 months - yet despite the heavy reading load, most books made me want to delve deeper and read more about the period, about the issue, by the author etc.  Some much history and so many things I have a glancing awareness of but no knowledge.

GOETHE background - 'last' Renaissance man
1749-1832, born in Frankfurt, died in Weimar
Contemporary of Wollstonecraft
Born in the Holy Roman Empire, prior to unification of Germany (1871). HRE dissolved during his lifetime
At age 27, went to live in Weimar, died there (though in Italy for a period)
French soldiers invaded Weimar while he was living there, entered his house and his mistress convinced the soldiers to leave the house.  They married the following day
The Age of Enlightenment - away from Religion, towards Romanticism and emotions/passions/sensibility
Writer, poet, philosopher, natural scientist, critic, director, actor, painter, lawyer, government minister/advisor
Heigl, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert

Opposed French Revolution, opposed Romantic tradition (critical of emotional excesses)
In Italy during a period of renaissance of neo-classical influences
Like a German Shakespeare vis a vis language (as Dante was for Italy)
Accused by scientists of trying to import romanticism into science (i.e.: work with colours) - more appreciated in 21st c.  Hard science doesn't give us all the answers.


FAUST
Part 1 more about Faust, Part 2 more about society.
Goethe finished Faust Part 2 just before his death
Goethe wrote the work over an extended period 1773-1831
Original idea was a simple legend about a magician who makes a deal with devil.

QUESTIONS
1. Compare Adam and Eve myth with Faust & Mephistopheles myth: searching for knowledge, Fall from Grace, serpent

Faust wants all knowledge and Mephisto tells him he can't have god's understanding of universe, meaning of universe.  Offers him alternatives.
Mephisto tempts people but they have a choice.

Jung was very influenced by Goethe and Faust and relation of myth with collective unconsciousness.
Science vs intuition
Germany began to divide learning into departments: science vs philosophy etc
The beginnings of the concept of dangerous knowledge.

2. Is Faust a victim of a pact made by forces more powerful than himself, or a self-centred individual who leads an innocent young girl to her ruin?

Faust wanting to know and unify everything.
Mephisto couldn't tempt Gretchen as too pure but Faust could ensnare her with love.

3.  In the Prologue, Mephisto argues that "man's life would be easier without Reason - for he uses it only for bestial pursuits." Is this a fair assessment?
Goethe would agree with Hume that we are using Reason to serve passions.


Movement in Germany that assigns naziism and Holocaust to Reason - as a very rational approach to a goal and how to accomplish it.  It's a frightening thought, but this is probably the only approach that would enable people to commit such atrocities - remove the emotion, the empathy, the reactions from it.
WWI was a tremendous blow to reason - such a big change - got even worse with WWII and after.

Passion is pushing us to do things but reason separated from morals can be horrifying and terribly destructive.  See Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Goethe sees the start of the industrial revolution: destruction of cities, families, rise of importance of individuals, science, production and innovation - and foresees the dangers of where mankind was heading.

Goethe seemed to support man's striving - for the best of something.  We will read another of his texts in the new year and I'm curious to see how it compares to Faust.

This is it until 2013!

Love is a Stranger by Rumi

Rumi, Live Is a Stranger, Transl. by Kabir Helminski, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London 2000



Rumi was also a 13th century writer (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273).  He was a Sufi mystic, born in Persia but in what is now Tajikistan, Afganistan.

I’d read a few of Rumi’s poems before but didn’t know anything about him.  Like everything else I’m reading this term, there is so much more I want to know about that time period: what was going on everywhere else at the time, more about sufiism, more about Persia and Afganistan at the time, more about Islam.  Rumi’s poetry reminded me of Sappho – maybe because both wrote so passionately about love and the beloved.  It’s hard for me to analyze and dissect these poems – their strength for me lies in the emotions I feel when reading them, in the power of the words - and so I want to save certain pieces I loved, so I can come back and savour them later.  I can see this being a book I’ll want to come back to and read in the future.

Rumi speaks often of love as being as a unifying force, of two souls combining. 

In I AM NOT (on page 56) he says:

I have put duality away

And seen the two worlds as one.

THE RUINS OF MY HEART (page 49)

[…]

My soul spills into yours and is blended

Because my soul has absorbed your fragrance,

I cherish it.

Every drop of blood I spill

informs the earth,

“I merge with my Beloved when I participate in love.”

[…]

He often includes imagery of wine and drunkenness, perhaps to show how love intoxicates the lover, how love infuses you and affects your thoughts, body and reason.  Many of his poems mention his beloved, Shamsi Tabriz.  At the end of  SWEEP THE DUST OFF THE SEA, on page 34

The Sun of Tabriz keeps me

drunk and languishing in this state

THE INNER GARMENT OF LOVE (pg 69)

[…]

Be drunk with love,

for love is all that exists.

Where is intimacy found

If not in the give and take of love.

Love for Rumi seems to be his way through the world, to spirituality, to fulfillment.  It’s not all sweetness & light and angels singing.  Many of his poems mention fire, burning, conflict, suffering, piercing.

DIDN’T I SAY? (Pg 22)

[…]

Didn’t I say, “They will waylay you and make you cold,

I am the fire and your warm desire.”

[…]

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 41)

[…]

Those glances of love were arrows,

piercing and killing all reason

[…]

Hundreds of thousands of full moons

Are dedicated to the all night fever of His love

[…]

All perceptions are riding on lame donkeys,

While He is an arrow travelling through space.

[…]

In SONG OF THE REED (pg 50)

[…]

I want a heart torn open with longing

to share the pain of this love.

[…]

It is the fire of love that inspires the flute.

It is the ferment of love that completes the wine.

[…]

THE INNER GARMENT OF LOVE (pg 69)

[…]

If they ask what Love is,

Say: the sacrifice of will.

If you have not left your will behind,

You have no will at all.

[…]

Between the mirror and the heart

Is this single difference:

The heart conceals secrets,

While the mirror does not.

Rumi contrasts love and reason in some of his poems with reason proving the lesser faculty.

THE PULL OF LOVE (pg 31)

 […]

Though reason is learned and has its honours,

It pawned its cap and robe for a cup of love.

[…]

He describes reason as something very black and white, cold, demanding - not as a quality that brings purpose, depth and joy to life.

LOVE IS RECKLESS (pg 53)

Love is reckless; not reason.

Reason seeks a profit.

Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,

Love proceeds like a millstone

Hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,

She risks everything and asks for nothing.

Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

[…]

Religion seeks grace and favour,

But those who gamble these away are God’s favourites,

For they neither put God to the test

Nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

LOVE IS A STRANGER (pg 18)

[…]

Reason, do not envy my mouth.

[…]

 whether you have raised a flag or a pen,

the night is gone and day has arrived,

and the sleeper shall see what he has dreamed.

He seems to suggest that reason tries to control love, to control the body and the person.  I’m not sure where Rumi thinks reason lives.  One of his line talks about covering “my reason, my head and my feet” suggesting Rumi doesn’t associate reason with the brain, certainly not with the heart as Mencius did.

WHAT A MAN CAN SAY (pg 28)

In the name of friendship

Don’t repeat to my Beloved

All that I said last night,

Out of my mind;

But if, by God, she hears it,

She’ll understand what a man can say

In the dark, loud or quiet, rough or soft,

When reason is not at home.

[…]

THE HOUSE OF LOVE (pg 67)

[…]

But you build up thought

like a massive wooden door.

Set fire to the wood.

Silence the noise of the heart.

Hold your harmful tongue.

While Rumi seems to fully support Love, this doesn’t apply to all passions (greed, envy etc).

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 42)

[…]

If night never came, people would waste themselves

Pursuing all that they desire.

They would give their own bodies to be consumed

For the sake of their desires and greed,

But night appears, a treasure of Mercy,

To save them from desires for a short while.

[…]

When it comes to love though, moderation does not seem to be what Rumi recommends.

EMPTY THE GLASS OF YOUR DESIRE (pg 74)

Join yourself to friends

And know the joy of the soul.

Enter the neighbourhood of ruin

With those who drink to the dregs.

Empty the glass of your desire

So that you won’t be disgraced.

Stop looking for something out there

And begin seeing within.

[…]

When the earth is this wide,

Why are you asleep in a prison?

Think of nothing but the source of thought.

Feed the soul; let the body fast.

Love is not without its suffering but for Rumi even this has purpose. Love and spirituality are joined together in Rumi’s poetry.  For Rumi, Love seems to be transcendent and his words make you feel that even if it hurts and changes and doesn’t give you a “fairytale” ending, Love is a path worth pursuing because of its transcendent power:

THE GUEST HOUSE (pg 44)

[…]

Whatever sorrow takes away or causes the heart to shed,

it puts something better in its place –

especially for one who is certain

that sorrow is the servant of the intuitive.

[…]

WHEN A MAN AND WOMAN BECOME ONE (pg 55)

[…]

The garden of love is green without limit

and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy.

TO TAKE A STEP WITHOUT FEET (pg 59)

This is love: to fly towards  a secret sky,

To cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

[…]

LOVE IS A STRANGER (pg 18)

[…]

Love is a stranger with a strange language

[…]

ON THE DEATHBED (pg 23)

[…]

On this path, Love is the emerald,

the beautiful green that wards off dragons.

 […]

A WORLD WITH NO BOUNDARIES (pg 61)

With every breath the sound

Of love surrounds us,

And we are bound for the depths

Of space, without distraction.

We’ve been in orbit before

And know the angels there.

Let’s go there again, Master,

For that is our land.

[…]

out beyond duality

we have a home, and it is Majesty

[…]

These following lines don’t really demonstrate anything related to reason or passion but they are just phrases that I liked and wanted to remember.

ELEGY FOR SANA’I (pg 68)

[…]

he valued the whole world at a single barleycorn.

[…]

WORDS OF ALI WHEN HE REFUSED TO KILL AN OPPONENT WHO SPAT IN HIS FACE (pg 82)

[…]

I am not chaff but a mountain of patience.

[…]

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 43)

[…] the eyes of the wise see to the end […]

PHEDRE by Racine

PHÉDRE by Jean Racine, Tr by Ted Hughes

This book was quite interesting.  Before reading it, I had looked at some links to movie clips that Stephen had sent out.  There are a few clips and a movie trailer on youTube for  PHEDRE directed in 1962 by Jules Dassin and starring Anthony Perkins and Melina Mercouri.  The clips were very melodramatic.  Black and white with a voice-over describing Phedre in sharp, dramatic terms.  The scenes are emotional, Phedre pacing restlessly and throwing herself on the bed weeping, gazing longingly at Hippolytus, slapping her maid.  These may have coloured my perception of the play and of Phedre.

The language of the play seemed very different.  Phedre was written in the 17^th century by Racine, then translated in the last century by Ted Hughes, poet laureate in Great Britain – and this may be where the stylistic difference comes from.

It is the story of Phedre, married to Theseus.  When she married him, she met his son Hippolytus for the 1st time and fell in love with Hippolytus.  She tried to block out this love by living away from Hippolytus and treating him harshly so that he would take against her.  As the play opens, Theseus has been away for a long time and is reported dead.  This news causes Phedre to confess her love to Hippolytus, who in turn has fallen in love (secretly) with a young hostage, Aricia.  Just as all these conflicting events are unfolding, Theseus returns.  Phedre's loyal nurse convinces Phedre to allow Theseus to believe that Hipploytus has been importuning Phedre. Father and son have a fight and Theseus fatally curses his son.  Hippolytus speeds off in his chariot and dies bravely fighting a sea monster, the nurse commits suicide and Phedre confesses her illicit love to her husband and unable to face the wreckage she has caused, she takes poison (brought to Athens by her "sister, Medea") and dies.

While this play had all the elements of tragedy, it seemed a bit empty - I'm not really sure why.  When I look for reason and passion here, passion has the upper hand.  Theseus' absence and presumed death is the spark that sets off the chain of events.  He likely has been away indulging his passions.  Phedre is tormented by her passion for Hippolytus, which her reason tells her is wrong.  Hippolytus has a reputation for being chaste but he has a passion for Aricia.  He also has the impetuous passion of youth, that causes him to bolt when he is unjustly accused by his father, and which, along with his bravery, leads to his death.  His father Theseus loses his son when he allows his passion and anger at being betrayed cause him to fatally curse his son.  Though he quickly regrets this and tries to undo the curse, it's too late.  The nurse gives in to her passionate love (loyalty, jealousy?) for Phedre and plots to throw the blame on Hippolytus to save Phedre. When this causes more grief for Phedre, the nurse kills herself.  Phedre allows her passion for Hippolytus to ruin her life though when she tried reason to put distance between herself and Hippolytus, she was able to cope and survive, albeit very unhappily.  At the end when she sees what she has caused and what she has allowed to happen, she kills herself (helped by her very passionate sister, Medea).